Gifts of Inspiration
Below is an approximate transcript of the Dharma Talk I gave on May 19th as part of O-An Zendo’s Sunday program. You can read the transcript or listen to the live recording.
Thank you for listening, reading, and supporting. I bow with gratitude.
It is shaping up to be an eventful year for O-An Zendo, the humble forest refuge where I live, practice, and serve the local sangha and broader community. In addition to our weekly offerings, monthly full days of practice, and quarterly sesshins (multi-day meditation retreats), there will be at least two ordination ceremonies.
In June, there is Moon On The Water, the Zendo’s first women’s sesshin. The sesshin’s ceremonial conclusion is Jukai, lay ordination for three of our Dharma sisters. In October, we will hold our annual O-Bon sesshin to honor our ancestors and those who have passed away. The ceremonial conclusion for that sesshin—tentatively, anyway—is Shukke Tokudo, novice priest ordination for one of our Dharma brothers. There may be one more lay ordination this year, too.
Five ordinations in one year, potentially. For a small sangha in central Pennsylvania, that is something to notice and celebrate.
What is Jukai, though, and what is Shukke Tokudo? What does it mean to be “ordained,” whether as a lay practitioner or priest? Sometimes, we hear of someone asking to “receive precepts.” What are these “precepts”—the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts—and what does it mean to “receive them”? These are meaningful questions.
And I will not respond to any of them, at least not here anyway. I do not deny that these are meaningful questions, but they are not the most meaningful.
Why might someone ask to “receive precepts”? Why might someone desire to be ordained as a lay practitioner and, perhaps later, as a priest? Why might someone commit to sewing a Rakusu—a significant undertaking, by the way—in preparation for Jukai? And then, perhaps, commit to sewing a Zagu and an Okesa (and, in some cases, a second Rakusu) in preparation for Shukke Tokudo? For one thing, it is a lot of sewing. Fifteen thousand four hundred sixty-five stitches help form this robe, this Okesa. That is a lot of stitches!
These questions, too, are meaningful. In a way, they are the most meaningful questions. What is that way? When they become about you.
Why am I considering asking Roshi to receive precepts? Some of you might be asking yourselves that question.
Why did I ask Roshi to receive precepts? Why do I desire to be lay-ordained? Others of you can ask these questions.
Why did I ask to receive precepts for a second time? Why do (or did) I desire to be priest-ordained? A few of us can ask these questions, too.
Now, I cannot respond to any of these questions for you—that is, on your behalf. The reason is straightforward: I am not you! Even if you told me all the significant experiences that contributed to entertaining and asking these questions, I could not respond to them on your behalf. Once more, I am not you! It is one thing to hear someone’s story—that is all it is, by the way, a story. It is another to be the person who went through the selected experiences that provide the story’s shape, along with those left unmentioned, contributing to their being where they are.
I can share part of my response to these questions with you, however, and that is what I want to do this morning. In particular, I want to share a little about why I asked Koan Gary Janka, Sensei, my first teacher, to receive the Bodhisattva precepts in a Jukai ceremony. For my Dharma sisters Renkei, Shinryu, and me—I was lay-ordained alongside two other sangha members—that ceremony took place almost ten years ago—on January 18th, 2015. I was given the Dharma name “Taishin,” meaning “peaceful heart-mind.”
From one point of view, the story centers on my friendship with Tony Johansen. I met Tony in the fall of 2012, shortly after moving from Atlanta, GA, to Santa Barbara, CA. It was then that I decided to move my interest in meditation, Buddhism, and Zen from reading on the couch to sitting on a cushion. I decided to find (and succeeded in finding) a sangha.
The Santa Barbara Zen Group met at Tony’s house in those days, tucked away on Glendessary Lane in Mission Canyon, just outside downtown Santa Barbara. By that time, Tony had been practicing for nearly fifty years. He had met Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi, in 1964 through his then-wife—Tony’s then-wife—who also went by “Toni” but with an “i.” Tony and Toni received the Bodhisattva precepts from Suzuki Roshi on August 25th, 1970. It was the first time Suzuki Roshi had officiated a Jukai ceremony since 1962.
I did not learn Tony’s Dharma name until after he died. He never used it—as seems to be the fashion in California both now and then—and I never thought to ask him about it, even when I was sewing a Rakusu for Jukai. Apparently, Suzuki Roshi named him “Reiun,” after a Chinese master who awakened upon seeing peach blossoms in full bloom.
Dōgen Zenji records the story in Shōbōgenzō Keisei-sanshiki (Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors):
One spring day, after practicing for thirty years, Lingyun [Reiun], who would later become Zen Master Zhiqin, walked into the mountains. While resting he saw peach blossoms in full bloom in a distant village and was suddenly awakened. He wrote this poem, which he presented to Guishan:
For thirty years I have looked for a sword master. Many times leaves fell, new ones sprouted. One glimpse of peach blossoms— now no more doubts, just this.Guishan said, “One who enters with ripened conditions will never leave.” He approved Lingyun [Reiun] in this way.
Tony often drove the Suzuki Roshi to Los Altos, CA; it was one of the many ways his practice unfolded while living in San Francisco in the 1960s. Los Altos was home to Haiku Zendo, where Suzuki Roshi would lead zazen practice on Wednesday evenings and offer talks that would later be collected and published in the now-classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Coincidentally, Haiku Zendo was where Kobun Chino Roshi served as the Guiding Teacher beginning in 1971.
Here is a story told by Tony about driving Suzuki Roshi to Los Altos, CA:
I used to drive Suzuki Roshi to Los Altos - Antoinette and I would take turns driving him down for zazen and lectures. I'd go in the morning and I taught in the East Bay and someone would take him home and then he'd come back at night. We had to leave at four to get down there in time and one time I was driving him and we went up the Fell Street entrance to the freeway and it was dark and wet and there was a very very heavy fog and I had a 61 Volkswagen and Suzuki Roshi was in the passenger seat and Lynn Workof was in the back and when I got up to speed there was an Oldsmobile in the lane beside me and the cement guardrail on the left and out of the mist there appeared a flatbed truck parked in my lane and I hit the brakes and I started to slide right toward this mouthful of flatbed and the Olds and I were traveling at the same speed and I couldn't change lanes and at the last conceivable minute I hit a dry spot and my brakes caught enough for the Olds to get ahead and I slammed it into third and whipped around the edge of the flatbed to behind the Olds and Suzuki Roshi said, “Very good.”
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in November. I was at Tony’s house, cleaning the room that held our pop-up zendo on Sundays. I had swept the bamboo floors and cleared the cobwebs. The zabutans and zafus were removed from the storage closet and placed around the room’s edges. Then, I sat down and set up the bells and mokugyo at the Dōan’s seat. I was being trained to serve as Dōan that Saturday, too.
Tony and I went through the Heart Sutra a few times. I remember struggling to keep time on the mokugyo, holding its mallet in my right hand while my left hand moved between strikers for the big and small bells, each rung at specific times during the sutra’s chanting. The Dōan leads the chanting, too, as some of you are aware.
So, there I was: trying to keep time, play the bells when indicated in the score, and chant with some confidence
Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when practicing deep Prajnaparamita, clearly saw that all five skandhas are empty, transforming all suffering and distress.
And so on. As you can imagine, I felt a little overwhelmed.
After a few run-throughs, it was time for a story. Tony had participated in an interfaith Thanksgiving gathering at a local Unitarian church for several years. He was the (self-described) “token Buddhist” who appeared, shared some “basics of Buddhism,” and then introduced and led a reading of the Heart Sutra. “An interesting choice,” I thought. “Surely, the Metta Sutta would be more appropriate, more accessible, for that sort of gathering.”
Tony had that year’s program with him for some reason. The organizers had sent it in advance, requesting confirmation that all the information appeared correctly, nothing was misspelled, and so on.
He pointed out that the program read: Tony Johansen. The Thanksgiving Sutra.
“What?! The Thanksgiving Sutra?!” I thought. “There is no ‘Thanksgiving Sutra!’ Why these incompetent, inconsiderate organizers! They cannot even print the correct name of the sutra that the token Buddhist is going to share at their interfaith Thanksgiving gathering?! How disrespectful! This is unacceptable! I want to speak to whoever is in charge!”
My thoughts were probably a bit more colorful—there was likely some spicier language; I cannot remember—but that is the gist of what arose in me.
By the way, I did not say any of this. Instead, I smiled and waited for Tony to continue. I did not need to say any of this, it turned out. The “rest of me”—however you want to understand that phrase—revealed it. Following a long, knowing look, Tony said, “When I read that, I thought, ‘Yeah! What a great name for the sutra!’ ‘Cause isn’t that what it’s all about?”
That response, those words—supported by many causes and conditions—cut right through. I saw the way that I was: judgmental and with great speed, arrogant and combative, a sort of “intellectual bully,” with more emphasis on the “bully” part than the “intellectual” part. I also saw a way that I could be: open-minded, slow (or slower) to arrive at conclusions, and then only provisionally, humble and not conceited, not proud or demanding, and, most importantly, generous and grateful.
Yeah! What a great name for the sutra!
Dōgen describes this sort of experience in Shōbōgenzō Genjōkōan, writing:
When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you may assume it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.
What was missing? My comfortable, self-centered way of relating to people, places, and things. It was clear to me, though for only a moment, that I did not need to continue moving with the world in a self-absorbed way. Instead, I could move with it as Tony did—and I wanted to do that, too.
But then arose the question: How? “Although there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach,” writes Dōgen.
I felt that my “eye of practice” could not reach very far. But it did not need to reach any farther than a few feet from me, for there sat Tony, his navy blue Rakusu hanging from his neck. The Rakusu was a sign of his commitment to a particular way of being with the world, which he made forty-two years ago. In the following weeks, I decided to make that same commitment when the opportunity appeared.
My friendship with Tony, on that afternoon and for the few years we were able to practice together, breathed new life into my practice. He was and continues to be a gift of inspiration.
As I start to conclude this offering, I want to stay with Tony’s response. He said the “Thanksgiving Sutra” was a great name for the Heart Sutra. Why?
‘Cause isn’t that what it’s all about.
Until a few days ago, I still did not understand why that was the response, how that—giving thanks—reflected a central teaching of the Heart Sutra. Namely, that
form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness; whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form. The same holds for sensation and perception, volition and consciousness.
Tony gave a Dharma talk before he passed away, titled “Life Support.” I have a copy of the talk, and I spent some time with it as I prepared for this morning.
The talk explores how we are supported by everything. We are all on “life support,” as Tony puts it. “[L]ife support does not just mean intensive care with tubes and machines […] we don’t need to be hooked up to a monitor, electrodes pasted to our chest, wrists, and ankles,” he wrote. We only need to realize, he says with no apology, that “we are nothing.” Absolutely nothing.
When we see this, however, we also see that we are supported by everything.
[T]he physical functioning of our complex and vulnerable bodies […] everything that has happened to us […] [t]he whole kaleidoscope of adversity and blessing [that] has brought us to this moment, strengthening us, weakening us, enabling, debilitating—all of it [… and] [o]ne day, maybe even today, that support will kick out from under us. It will not last. Eventually, that support will no longer exist and we will die—end, stop being. This amazing and most complex amalgam of interconnectedness supports us right to the moment when it doesn’t. Plain and simple, to be alive is to be supported.
Since this is the case, what is there to do?
Nothing. Nothing except be aware of the light switch that hangs on the cosmic wall right above each and every one of our heads and that it can be lights on, lights out, anytime, anywhere, any moment. Be aware and savor with gratitude, pure and unadulterated gratitude, each and every moment that the lights are on. Be grateful for each and every fiber of support that underlies our very existence—our functioning body, our beating heart, our inhaling and exhaling lungs, the water we have to drink, the food we have to eat, the clothing and shelter that warms us and keeps us dry, the love that gives us meaning, everyone and everything that brings us that support. Move through these moments in a perpetual bow of gratitude. Be that fiber of support for others.
May you hear Tony’s words with your whole, non-substantial self this morning. “Be grateful for the infinite support that holds you in your place in this universal woven tapestry of existence. Go through life—this light switch on, light switch off life—with a deep bow of gratitude.”
Thank you very much.
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